


A pebble in the pond.

by uhhhhhhh (redundant)



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Minor Character Death, Not a lot though, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Some Plot, bucky's kind of a wizard ish idk man, comma abuse and half-assed metaphors this fic has it all, more to come is such an ominous phrase i love it, none of this is really serious, steve rogers gets into fights a lot, steve's a fallen star
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-24
Updated: 2018-04-03
Packaged: 2019-04-07 08:43:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14077158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redundant/pseuds/uhhhhhhh
Summary: Bucky’s heart is singing. Heavenly choirs are shining down bright enough to blind him, and there are trumpets and strings and an entire woodwind section in glorious surround sound, serenading them both. There is an entire militia of cherubs and angels plucking away furiously at harps. He feels the sudden urge to twirl on a grassy hilltop in Austria and smile benevolently at the clouds. He is ridiculously, ridiculously happy.“Jesus,” says Bucky instead. “Again?”---UPDATE: This fic is on hiatus, sort of! It's now called "A boy and his star.", will heavily feature all the writing I did here, and has more of that sweet sweet angst than you probably wanted. You can read ithere.





	1. Chapter 1

It’s around four in the morning, and Bucky is freezing his ass off.

There’s a slight breeze that rustles the garbage bags in the alley below him. It plucks the autumn leaves off the family of trees crowded between streetlights, and twists around his fingers till they are numb and clumsy with cold, purple against his knees. His teeth clack, the noise sharp against the low hum of electricity woven into the air. A car rushes past on the street below him. He kicks halfheartedly, watches his feet swing, feels his heels thud against the side of the building. An exhale- his breath curls in front of him. This was a bad idea. But he can deal with the cold, he can, and so he shifts around until he’s sitting on his hands. The concrete is rough and damp and kinda nasty, if he’s being honest, and he’ll be picking gravel out of his palms for days, but he’ll deal.

Even though the mildew patch next to his pinky finger looks like it might be radioactive.

He wrinkles his nose and shifts around again so he’s leaning on his elbows. Hands in fists. Ratty sneakers propped up on the ledge. Head tipped up to the cotton ball clouds, stretched thin across a starless sky. Jesus, it’s cold. He can hear Sam crystal-clear in his head, telling him that his reaction to inform himself to _man the fuck up, dude_ is a sign of internalised misogyny and that he should really get into that, unpack it some. See where the emotions lead him. But this rooftop is where the emotions have led him- this empty rooftop, staring up at an empty sky, because his goddamn emotions have woken him up in the middle of the goddamn night and his throat is raw and his eyes sting not just because of the cold. And hey. An empty rooftop is better than a tray of empty shot glasses at Thor’s, and a cracking voice is better than a fractured hand because he’s punched a wall, which led to having to deal with a flurry of ridiculously high medical bills- thanks, capitalism!- and spending two afternoons looking for a Healer and staring despondently at YouTube search results for _how to fix a wall_ , getting sucked down the rabbit hole of WikiHow, which somehow led to Reddit, which somehow led to Pinterest, and- yeah. Point is, there is a laundry list of worse things he could be doing, so this is pretty okay.

There is also a laundry list of better things he could be doing, but. But but but. Talking to Becka is impossible without a Ouija board or a necromancer (and he sure as shit ain’t going there), he feels kinda guilty about potentially waking up his therapist-Healer-neighbour-friend at four in the fucking morning, and meditation is off the table. He isn’t going to start- braiding his hair or whatever, and wearing yoga pants, and talking earnestly about chakras and third eyes, although the metric ton of candles Natasha got him for the express purpose of meditation are still in his room. They are, you know, in his closet, buried under some faded band tees, but they are there. Anyway. His chest hurts and his thoughts are doing that thing again, and oxygen sounded like a Good Idea when he was suffocating in a tangle of musty bedsheets, so. Here he is.

It’s always better when he looks up. The spikiness kind of retracts and his shoulders relax, and the tightness in his diaphragm loosens until his lungs can actually start filling again, greedy snatches of air. Gravel is digging into the points of his elbows, but that’s alright. It clears his mind a little. Cuts through the haziness. At least his sweatpants are warm. A heating charm would have been a good idea, but he hasn’t had one of those in about eighty-six years.

And then he senses it, and tenses up: there is something on the roof with him.

It is a cat-shaped patchwork of darks and lights. Nat’s calico. He breathes out.

She sits by the other ledge, regarding him with reflective eyes as she licks her paws.

“You too, huh?”

Goose eyes him a little longer before moving closer, paws silent on the ground.

“Come here,” he says, crossing his legs and pushing himself up. He sticks out his hand- not the metal one, that one spooks her- to skritch her behind the ears; she brushes against his thigh and settles by his knees, claws all tucked away. He allows himself a smile. It might be sad that his only company right now is a feline, but she’s living, breathing, purring, a steady rumble in her chest. She looks content.

“You know something?” he says. The words hang in the air, hopeful and stupid. Goose just blinks at him.

They stay there a while, long enough that his foot starts falling asleep, long enough that his thoughts start going the same consistency as pasta that’s been boiling too long; thoughts about familiars and the witching hour and how the sharp buzz of magic is clearer, now, and how the lights still flicker; how still his heart and how high the moon. They are there long enough that Goose loses interest and wanders away and it’s just him on the roof.

Bucky- despite it all- is a sentimental kind of guy. He has The Little Mermaid soundtrack saved on Spotify, and he still keeps a spare toothbrush in the mug on his sink, and he looks up at the sky sometimes when he wants to feel less alone. And Bucky- despite the goosebumps on his arm- is getting used to the cold, so he keeps looking up at the stars beyond the cotton-ball clouds, in the dark, in his fluorescent yellow shirt. In-breath, out-breath. Voices, loud, passing under him; the clink of glass bottles. Smoke unspooling against the dim, shadowy, sodium-tinted streetlights, blurring his vision a little until his breath dissipates and the air is 1080p again. He does this for a while, till the world slows down and the tangles loosen. Until his mind is clear.

“Hey, pal,” he says to the empty sky. “It’s been getting kinda shitty.”

The sky does not reply.

“Stupid. Even now, I’m thinking- this is stupid and I’m stupid and what the fuck am I doing, but church ain’t an option and, well, this is nice. I’m freezing, but this is nice. And I figure if you’re going to get here- look, it’s an open space.”

Silence.

“I know you’re not going to reply,” he continues, “but- yeah. Not to sound like a sap, but it’s been a while, so. I- yeah. Only person I can talk to about this is you, and you’re gone.” An afterthought: “Asshole.” His mouth ticks up despite himself. “And I look crazy talking to myself on this damn roof. I’ll deal, though.”

A flash of white that sears his retinas. A sound like thunder on cymbals. A groan, and then another crash, smaller, like a dustbin falling over.

Bucky’s heart leaps out his chest cavity into his throat, and he’s scrambling up, pounding down the fire escape before he knows what he’s doing. It’s twelve floors, and his shoes slip on the rain-slick metal, but he’s down, bones decidedly un-broken, in thirty seconds flat.

He turns the corner, flat-out sprinting now, round the back of the building where the exposed brick crumbles and the old, springless sofa sags, and the boxes have piled up and there is something that looks like a crumpled pile of clothes in the mountain of garbage bags is stirring, rising. Bucky halts. The clothes are on a pale, short, skinny frame. A glint of blond hair in the dim, dim light. Bloody nose. Split lip. Black eye. Left hand cradled in the crook of his arm. His other hand’s balled up into a fist; wheezing, ragged breath; tiny clouds floating up to the ones in the sky.

And then a spark of recognition- the fist loosens, and Steve’s face almost literally lights up.

“Hey, Buck.”

Bucky’s heart is singing. Heavenly choirs are shining down bright enough to blind him, and there are trumpets and strings and an entire woodwind section in glorious surround sound, serenading them both. There is an entire militia of cherubs and angels plucking furiously away at harps. He feels the sudden urge to twirl on a grassy hilltop in Austria and smile benevolently at the clouds. He is ridiculously, ridiculously happy.

“Jesus,” says Bucky instead. “Again?”

“I could have gotten this from the landing,” Steve points out, defensive. “You picked a real great place to be, pal. Nearly crash-landed on the roof.”

“I didn’t ask you to crash-land anywhere,” Bucky sort of half-lies.

“You _know_ how the spell works. When I locate you, I can only show up in a seven-meter radius.”

“Still can’t believe they use metric.”

“It’s the better system,” Steve says with a long-suffering sigh that turns into a cough.

Bucky can’t help but feel like the conversation has derailed. “ _Anyway_ ,” he says, in an attempt to get it back on track to _Steve-Rogers-What-Have-You-Done_ sville. “You got into a fight.”

Steve mutters something that might include the words “some hello”, but Bucky’s brain is fried like an egg from all that light earlier, and the heavenly choir has popped out of his head, leaving him with his heartbeat in his ears, and he doesn’t quite know what to do with his arms.

“Didn’t you say you weren’t gonna do anything stupid?”

A familiar scowl settles on Steve’s face. “I had ‘em on the ropes.”

“ _Them_?” asks Bucky. He feels a little lightheaded. “Plural?”

“So what?”

“So, you got a death wish?”

“I can handle myself.”

“Yeah,” Bucky snorts, “no, yeah, I can see that. You look just fine.”

“Better than you,” Steve says. Bucky blinks, and Steve’s face drops slightly, and his words rush into the sudden stillness between them. “That shirt’s so bright I could see it from space.”

 _That_ _was the point_ , Bucky does not say. He forces a smile, waits till it’s properly taken hold of him to speak. “Asshole,” he does say. “It’s good to see you. Been too long.”

“Yeah,” says Steve, and his eyes flicker down to his shoes, then back up. “Yeah, it has.”

“How long you been in town?”

Steve shrugs. “A week or two. Landed in Chile, weirdly. I zapped myself a few places. Always wanted to see South America.”

“Cool,” says Bucky. “What’s it like?”

“Hot, some places. And the mountains are cold.”

“They do that,” says Bucky, stupidly. He grins. “You haven’t changed much.”

“It’s only been-” Steve’s nose wrinkles. “How long has it been?”

 _Seventeen months and twenty seven days_ , Bucky does not say. “Come here.” Steve shuffles closer, and Bucky opens his arms, closes the distance between them. Underneath all the dumpster, Steve smells a little like the airport. Like he’s just dropped out the ozone layer. He breathes it in- one second, two- before patting Steve’s shoulder, stepping away. “You got showers up in the sky?”

“Never really needed one.”

“You do now,” says Bucky. He laughs when Steve scowls at him. “You wanna come on up?”

He does, so they do. Round to the front of the building. Bucky doesn’t have his keys- didn’t think he’d need them- but the main door’s always unlocked, anyway, if you know where to push. They enter- it’s warmer inside, if only marginally; he can still see his breath. Central heating down here is a fucking joke. Over cracked tile to a button in the wall. Waiting, for a moment or eighty-three, in the dark, for the elevator to come; here, in the shadows, Steve is actually glowing. He remembers watching an eclipse once, when he was a kid, and him and Becka had to squint at the sun through a hole punched in black card with a pin. It’s like that, multiplied over and over. Starlight shines faintly through his pores. Bucky’s eyes keep on flickering over to Steve, but he can’t help it; Steve is there and he is whole. He is solid. His shoes are beat-up and scuffed as he toes the floor, impatient. Bucky huffs out a laugh.

“There something on my face?” Steve asks; the elevator dings.

“You look like a three year old,” Bucky says, and Steve throws a dirty look over his shoulder as they crowd into the tiny box that’s only just wide enough to fit them both.

He reaches around Steve, the human-shaped collection of atoms named Steve that is standing, real, right there in front of him, to press the button for the ninth floor. The _1_ and _5_ on the panel are in a different font, and look brighter, newer. The light’s flickering and a warm sort of orange, the mirror spotted black and cracked with age. It’s dusty. Bucky wonders, as they go up, if he could get paid to Windex it up a little. He doesn’t usually take the lift- too damn small- but this is a tightness he doesn’t mind, even if Steve is apparently made out of coat hangers that are intent on stabbing him. He doesn’t trust Steve not to fall over up the stairs, anyway.

“You hungry?”

Metal judders around them. “Not really,” says Steve, and Bucky raises an eyebrow.

“Really?”

“Yeah. Tomorrow, though.”

 _It_ is _tomorrow_ , Bucky does not say. Whatever. He cooks a mean omelette, and he knows he’s got onions and ham and bell peppers and cheese, somewhere - Steve is gonna have the best damn breakfast of his _life_ after this. He’s feeling a little giddy. A yawn. The elevator dings again, and spits them out into the darkness of the corridor.

“Watch your step,” Bucky warns: one of the pipes in the ceiling drips constantly, and there’s a blue bucket under it which he’s accidentally knocked over three too many times. Steve edges around it, stumbles a bit. Bucky sees his jaw clench as his hand jostles. A familiar pang shoots through his chest. Door. “That broken?” Door. “Sprained wrist, I think.” Door. “Jesus _Christ_.” Door. Defensively: “What?” And they’re at Bucky’s apartment, now, lifting up the corner of the disturbingly floral welcome mat ( _Live Laugh Love_ , looping cursive) that Sam gave him as a joke, picking up his keys- “Human 101,” Bucky tells Steve as he fiddles with the lock, “don’t keep your keys here or you’re gonna get burgled,” and Steve opens his mouth, probably to point out the obvious hypocrisy in his logic, but before any full words can exit the door’s open- Bucky ushers Steve in with an unnecessary palm between his shoulder blades. Locks the door behind him, flicks on the lights. “Home sweet home.” Steve looks around appreciatively. It’s warm, bright, and just because most of his stuff is from thrift stores and yard sales doesn’t mean he’s not meticulously neat- but there’s a stiffness to him that Bucky recognises; he’s hurt more badly than he’s letting on.

Bucky removes the hand. “You’re sure it’s sprained.”

“Buck, I’m _fine_.”

Bucky’s Steve-to-English translations are rough at best, but what he’s getting here is a resounding _yes, Bucky, I’m injured and I need help and I’m too proud to ask for it_.

“I have bandages in the bathroom,” he says. _Dipshit_ , he adds silently and affectionately.

They turn past the couch and coffee table with the fold-up chairs underneath it, where his laptop is charging, past the kitchen with the surprisingly good stove and the ancient washing machine in the back, down the hallway past the storage room and bedroom to the bathroom. He flips the switch; the light takes a moment to flicker on, and they’re in the dark for a moment, the bulb glowing a strange half-red before something buzzes and light spills over every surface, over the the beige tiles and yellowed plastic dividers boxing the shower into the corner, the porcelain of the toilet and sink, rusted taps, the mug on the sink holding two toothbrushes and a half-used tube of toothpaste; all of it briefly blinding. Steve blinks. 

Bucky sits Steve on the toilet seat- down, obviously; despite the state of the grout he’s not a complete heathen- and opens the medicine cabinet, grabs a couple rolls of bandages and a half-tube of antiseptic cream, a half-full bottle of Advil and half a half-expired Tylenol for good measure. He’s guessing about the half-expired bit. 

“We can get you fixed up properly in the morning,” Bucky tells him. “Friend’s a Healer. His name’s Sam, you’d like him.”

Steve nods. Bucky pretends he doesn’t notice the wince that accompanies it.

“Hold still.”

Bucky starts to wrap the bandage around Steve’s wrist. Steve hisses a curse through clenched teeth, and Bucky can’t ignore it. “Too tight?”

“I’m not a child, Buck.”

The hardness in Steve’s voice is not unfamiliar, but Bucky blinks all the same. This one is- different, kinda. He pushes it away and finishes wrapping Steve’s wrist. He doesn’t have a TV, but he’s got the password to Tony’s Netflix account. (The password changes about once every two weeks, but it’s become increasingly, ridiculously easy to crack: the last was _peppapotts_ , the one directly before that _pepperpig_ , so it’s not, you know, rocket science. It would seem Stark leaves that for his actual rockets.) He sets up his laptop and starts on Season Fuck Episode I Don’t Know of Chopped. And they sit down on Bucky’s springless sofa and watch Alton Brown rubbing his hands together as that Kathy chick gets a drummer-boy outfit and Jacqueline reigns supreme and Jean-Pierre or whatever his name is sits there practically twirling his mustache, and halfway through the next episode Steve’s head lolls on Bucky’s shoulder and he mumbles something quiet about wanting to watch something else. And so they go onto some property finding shit. Inwardly, Bucky sighs; outwardly, Bucky looks at the damp and mildew in his own apartment before turning back to Michael and Sherri-with-an-i finding a nice place next to some lake in Bumfuck, Nowhere- okay, fine, it’s either North Carolina or South Dakota, but he’s too drowsy to pay attention. The houses are beautiful but they all say no, no, no and the host may or may not be gay, which makes him tap Steve’s knee, ask “Does he not look, like, the least bit gay to you?” and Steve’s half-muffled response “I don’t really see how someone’s appearance would tell me what their sexual preferences are, Buck, unless they’re wearing a shirt that says _I’m Gay_ \- Buck, no, look at me, I know you’re bisexual but it’s still stereotyping no matter who does it-” and then Bucky’s “Jeez, okay Mr. Rogers.”

And inwardly, Bucky kind of likes this, being in the dark with Steve as they yawn and eventually the yawning becomes too much for the both of them to keep watching, so midway through Charlene and Tony’s journey to find a holiday home for their eight cousins, three siblings, fifteen and a half grandkids and two horses, Bucky shuts the laptop at Steve’s insistence and promises him they can catch up on the Rest of Pop Culture later, when the hour hand on his watch points to something with at least two digits. Bucky puts a hand around Steve’s shoulder because despite the blankets he’s shivering like crazy, teeth jackhammering the quiet into shards. He's still too broke to afford a house-wide warming charm, and so presses Steve closer, hopes it'll be enough. The shivers slow.

They’re silent, both of them. And their silence is warm, and it spreads between them and warps the air till it shimmers, though that might be Bucky’s tiredness. The sun is rising, out the tiny tiny window: the sky is bleeding to blue.

Steve’s eyes drift shut at last. Bucky stays there, in the half-dark, till his own eyelids are half-mast and closing, resting on something soft that isn’t a sofa and has too many elbows. The world outside is brightening as his own falls backward, backward, backward still, and then he’s suspended in space. He’s surrounded by vast, vast galaxies, crowded with infinite planets, star-streaked swathes of ink ribboning around him, glistening as they orbit around suns, stretch and swirl towards black holes, and he stays there, for a while, in the friendly darkness- giggling asteroids, laughing moons with star-filled mouths- and then the dream shifts: he is floating in the middle of an ocean that he knows, somehow, is really much smaller than it feels. He is looking up at the surface through his sunlit hair, at the light streaming in, slanted sun fractured and cracked as his bathroom mirror. He sees a pebble falling into a pond, and watches the ripples it leaves behind and the bubbles streaming from it, fever-bright in the murky sunbeams as it drifts to the bottom.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It’s four thirty, dipshit. You need to wake up.”
> 
> Steve's eye opens again. “Need is a strong word.”
> 
> “I’ll show you strong words,” Bucky warns him.  
> _
> 
> in which pretty much nothing happens.

“Steve,” says Bucky, softly.

An eye cracks open, somewhere in the crumpled, pretzel-y mass of star and blanket on his couch. It squints at him, then gives up and closes again. “Hrgh,” says the mass. Bucky pokes it.

“Steve, wake up.”

The voice is much clearer now. “No.” The blanket pile shifts, revealing a face, a shoulder. Through the open window floats the sound of traffic, and the afternoon sunlight slants down, throws light across the slash of Steve’s cheekbone and the bird’s nest of hair that’s decided to take residence on his head.

“It’s four thirty, dipshit. You need to wake up.”

Steve's eye opens again. “Need is a strong word.”

“I’ll show you strong words,” Bucky warns him.

In the time that Steve’s been asleep, Bucky’s been out and bought groceries and a sling, and managed to snag a healing potion or two off Sam. He’s also somehow managed to get himself into meeting Sam, Nat, and Clint for dinner tomorrow, which- it isn’t, you know, awful, because hey, he’s a student and hey, free food, but it’s a thing. And Bucky doesn’t want to do things today. He wants to stay at home and make Steve an omelette (to eat. not to like, turn him into one), and he wants to make sure Steve’s okay. But he also knows that Steve’s been wanting to meet Sam and Nat and Clint a while and he’s been in space doing star stuff, which generally puts those plans on the backburner. So to the dinner he has resigned himself. It wouldn’t be a problem, but he’s spent a ridiculous amount of time waiting for Steve to come back, and spent some of that time talking about Steve to Sam and Nat and Clint about Steve, and about all the stupid feelings in his chest-heart-thing. And it’s-

It could be weird, is all. Clint’s probably going to go all nudgenudgewinkwink and Nat will be Nat and Sam’s gonna start laughing at him. Which isn’t terrible, really. It does have the side-effect of making him feel a little anxious, which in turn switches on the projector in his head, which starts, completely unprompted, to play the Greatest Hits of Times You’ve Been Anxious, Volume 38273; this doesn’t do wonders for his already existing anxiety. So here he is, standing in front of Steve and probably being more pissy than is entirely necessary. Definitely more pissy. Dude crash-landed in a dumpster the night before, and he’s asking him to Get Up And Be A Productive Member Of Society like the Unsympathetic Friend and Capitalist Shill he is.

But Steve still smells like the dumpster he landed in, and he’s still on Bucky’s couch, and Bucky’s couch is kind of- soaking up the smell, which is gross. More significantly, though, Bucky’s kind of concerned that he’s going to starve to death if he lies here unchecked. Also, even _more_ significantly, Steve’s hand is swelling up, from what Bucky can see under the blanket, and he’s worried that the wrist might be more than just sprained.

So.

Bucky folds his arms. “So help me God, Rogers, get up or I will make you.”

“Don’t make me fight you,” Steve says, like the total jackass he is, and there is a tectonic shift of blankets as he rolls into a sitting position. He blinks- once, twice- through eyes half-shut with sleep. He stretches. His gaze lands on Bucky. “What.”

 _Why am I in love with you_ , Bucky wonders wearily. “Hand?”

Steve sticks it out. His scarecrow arm is bent at the elbow, tense at the shoulder. There is a slight clench to his jaw. Bucky shifts back a couple inches, and runs Steve through some basic checks. Rotate your wrist, touch your thumb to your pinky. Make a fist. Steve complies, and Bucky watches him: it’s probably a fracture. “I’m fine,” Steve insists.

“No, you’re not,” Bucky says accurately. “I’m giving you Sam’s potions, and then I’m healing the fracture myself afterwards.”

“How?”

“Conduit stuff.”

Something flashes across Steve’s face. “Buck-”

“Don’t.”

Steve presses on, heedless. “It’s been a couple years since you-”

“Yeah. I know,” says Bucky, because yeah, he knows.

Bucky was a natural Conduit growing up. It’s how Steve got here: catapulted from the heavens to the Earth with seven-year-old Bucky as the fulcrum. And then SHIELD and HYDRA- the best of the best of the best magic colleges in the country- found out about him. And then Becka died and money got tight and, well, SHIELD might have been Light and HYDRA very famously Dark, but HYDRA was offering him a free ride.

And then HYDRA actually happened. Which is a can of worms he doesn’t want to get into, even in exposition.

He’s kind of sort of getting back into Conduit stuff, but he’s nowhere near the same level he was before. Like- if he was fluent in Spanish, and then one day he woke up and had the vocabulary of half an episode of Dora. HYDRA fucked him up kinda bad there. Tragic backstory aside, this kind of thing isn’t- well. It’s going to be an Experience. Healing magic’s never been his forte; none of that witchy, herb-y, fire-burn-and-cauldron-bubble crap has ever appealed to him. But this won’t exactly be healing, just- a transfer. Conduit stuff on a different level. Like rolling a stone down a seesaw. He tries not to think about how rusty that seesaw is, how many rainy nights it’s sat there in the sandbox.

“Are you sure-”

“Yes, _Mom_.”

And Bucky isn’t sure when this turned ugly, but Steve’s face shuts down like a Borders bookstore. A beat; it rearranges itself into something more even. “Fuck off,” he says in a tone far too light to actually be, well, light.

Bucky pauses. There are two ways he could go about this: ask Steve what’s going on, or just move on and hope for the best. “None of your lip, missy.”

“I’m billions of years-”

“Older than me, yes.”

“It’s a shame.” Steve looks at him, the corner of his mouth twitching. “You kids these days. No respect for your elders.”

Bucky just rolls his eyes. He gives him Sam’s first potion, and, as per the instructions, waits till Steve’s earlobes have returned to their normal shade of not-purple before chasing it down with the second. “Okay,” he says, and leans back, puts the bottle down on the coffee table. Steve’s still looking at him. “You really, _really_ need a shower, but you should be okay.”

“Thank you,” says Steve. His voice is too soft, too earnest, for this moment. Silence lingers between them, a curtain caught in the wind, until- “You’re a dick.”

Bucky blinks. “Excuse me?”

“Just because I stink-”

“ _Stink_ is an understatement,” Bucky interrupts, “I can _hear_ the garbage germs growing on my couch-”

“My hand’s probably broken.”

Bucky rolls his eyes. “I just gave you a healing potion.” Steve’s mouth is opening, so he cuts him off. “And Sam’s a damn good Healer, alright, so don’t give me crap.” This testimony seems to be doing nothing, so he gives a shot at appealing to Steve’s better nature. “Steve, they’re forming colonies. They’re invading the native bacteria’s homes and oppressing their culture.”

“And you call me dramatic.”

Bucky glares at him. “Just take a fucking shower, Rogers.”

Steve gets off the couch, and Bucky gets a t-shirt and sweatpants out for him, from the bottom drawer of his cupboard in his bedroom, and gives him a towel and shows him back to the bathroom. He returns to the bedroom, sits on his bed. Mattress is more accurate, technically speaking, because Clint decided to host a fireball-powered roller-chair derby in his room a couple months back, and Bucky hasn’t had a bed frame since. Steve showers, and Bucky scrolls through his phone and tries not to think of Steve under the water- anyway. He has a text from Nat. Asking him how he’s doing. He sends back a star emoji and five exclamation marks, and then remembers his half-promise from the night before to make Steve breakfast. He gets up, leaving his phone on his bed, and knocks on the door.

“You want eggs?” he yells.

“What?”

“Eggs,” Bucky repeats.

“What?” Steve says again; Bucky hears the water stop.

“You want eggs? Yes, no, it’s fine if you say no, you’ve gotta eat something though-”

“Eggs?”

“Yeah,” says Bucky, beginning to feel a little stupid. “Eggs. Scrambled, fried, over easy- I could make an omelette?” The silence drips. “If that’s okay,” he adds, feeling a lot stupid. Stars eat stuff when they’re human, yeah, but eggs? Fucking _really_? Eggs? He briefly considers sinking into the floor

“That’d be great, Buck,” Steve says through the shower door, and Bucky feels his shoulders relax.

Bucky walks all seventeen steps to the kitchen. He makes an omelette for Steve. Cuts up bell pepper and onions, lets them sizzle in the nonstick till they’re sweating like a Gatorade commercial. Adds some chopped-up ham, and doesn’t wait too long before he cracks a couple eggs into the pan. He scrambles them, watching the bright yellow liquid soften in colour, mellow a little, as it runs through the cracks and solidifies.

He’s plated it and set the table before Steve walks in, a towel around his skinny shoulders. His clothes hang off him, but apart from the black eye, he looks fine. Good, even. Well-rested and clean and comfortable- Bucky’s heart tugs once before he says, as deadpan as possible, “Good morning.”

“It’s five in the afternoon.”

“Oh, so _now_ you’re worried about the time.”

Steve looks at him. “You-” he starts, and then shakes his head. “Where are those eggs?”

+

They catch up over eggs. Well- Steve is, technically speaking, situated in such a way that his mouth is over the plate, while Bucky rushes around the kitchen, trying to find something, anything he can give Steve. Coffee- probably not the best option, Steve’s sleep schedule is fucked enough already and Bucky doesn’t wanna make it worse; ancient cookies that wouldn’t be out of place in the Stone Age- yeah, no thanks; spice jars and repurposed salt shakers and a dark green bottle of something he doesn’t remember buying called _Howard’s Very Own Charm-Breaker_ , on which a small tag, running across the base, reads _curse-free gluten-free guilt-free!_. He makes a mental note to ask Natasha about that one.

And Bucky throws questions over his shoulder- where did you go? anything interesting happen? what made you wanna come back here?- like an endless string of scarves from a two-bit magician’s sleeve. They are punctuated by the scrape of the fork across his most un-cracked plate, and Steve’s answers, mumbled around a mouthful of food. Latin America, like he said yesterday. He saw the Andes from the ground for the first time, and saw rivers slicing through land, villages crowded at their banks. He saw the sun rise and watched it fall, and watched a half-moon wane away till it was a sliver in the sky. The radio hums in the background with some top 40 crap just catchy enough to make Bucky nod a little, tap his foot as he scrubs the pan clean, just for something to do with his hands. Fields stretch in front of his mind’s eye, row upon row of maize shivering in the wind. He came here, Steve continues, because he needed space. 

“You needed space,” Bucky repeats, and a shit-eating grin that he’s powerless to stop crawls onto his face. “And so you came to one of the most densely populated cities on a planet this tiny.”

“Not exactly tiny,” Steve says. “When I’m this small, I mean. And-” There is a brief tightness to his mouth, but it passes. “There’s- it’s different now, back there.”

Bucky waits a moment, but Steve doesn’t continue, and his shoulders are kind of- hunched in, and his elbows tilted out, and the fork sits awkwardly in his hand. It’s like he’s trying to hide behind himself. Bucky moves on. “You do any other cool shit?”

Steve perks up. “Hell yeah.” And he starts telling him about people- tour guides that tried to sell him crap, a goat trying to eat his pants, his first time meeting a drag queen in Caracas. “I rode a motorbike,” Steve says offhandedly, and Bucky, very casually, nearly has a heart attack and drops the pan.

The omelette is gone in a couple minutes, tops. Bucky tries and fails not to feel too pleased about that.

“Pop culture,” says Steve suddenly, in the midst of scraping the remaining cheese from the plate.

“What about it?”

“You were talking about a couple books a while ago, I was wondering-”

“Yeah,” says Bucky. “Yeah, no- yeah. They’re in my room.”

The chair legs whine in protest as they scrape across the floor. Bucky winces, but lets it go. He hesitates over the plates, wondering whether to dump them in the sink or not- fuck it, he decides, and lets them sit on the table; he leads Steve down the hallway and turns him left, right, left again (Clint had sworn by the expanding sigils carved into the walls, but they’d just ended up making the place a maze), through strips of dusty sunlight and shadow, their socked feet slipping. He takes Steve into his room. He’s not got a whole lot of stuff, so he’s not too concerned about it being messy; the only thing that could fall under that category is the pile of textbooks threatening to avalanche over his desk.

“First time I’m seeing this place in a while,” Steve comments, making a beeline for the bookshelf immediately.

“You can drop by whenever you want,” Bucky tells him. Bucky doesn’t tell him that this is what he wants Steve to do more than anything. He spreads his hands. “Mi casa, su casa.”

Steve runs a finger over the spines on the shelf. “That’s sweet.”

“It’s not sweet, you asshole, it’s practical-”

“You’re using _usted_ with me,” Steve says, his face perfectly straight as he picks out _The Happy Prince_ , scans the back. “Woulda thought we were past that.”

“Yeah, well,” says Bucky, “apparently I need to respect my elders more.” An expression somewhere between consternation and _why am I friends with you_ lodges on Steve’s face. “You wanna take care of that hand now?”

Steve pushes the book back in and settles down on the mattress, glancing briefly at Bucky’s phone, the lockscreen of which is lit up. Bucky hopes to God Natasha hasn’t sent anything weird. He glances around for something to use to fix up Steve’s hand, and then his eyes fall on the stack of candles Natasha gave him eighty million years ago. Perfect.

Steve’s wrist is thin enough that Bucky’s fingers can make a full circle around it. It’s thin enough to make Bucky look at Steve and actually, seriously wonder about when and where his last meal was, before he came here, but that’s an interrogation for another time. For now, he closes his eyes and grips the candle tight in his metal hand. His heartbeat is thundering soft in his ears. “Just hold still,” he instructs Steve, and huffs out a laugh when Steve stiffens even more. “Relax.” A buzzsaw drone in the back of his skull, the juncture between neck and spine. A low, insistent tug at his gut. And then it’s just him, and the fracture in Steve’s scaphoid, and the distance between them. “Relax,” he says again; Steve’s pulse, in Bucky’s ears, at the pads of his fingers, is fluttering. This kind of magic is a careful balance, a push-pull, and Steve’s pulling a bit too hard. “Breathe easy, okay?”

Slowly, Steve loosens; slowly, Bucky weans the white-hot pain from Steve’s wrist. He feels it slither through him, lingering and hesitant, but he doesn’t let it stop. He doesn’t take it on as his own. And slowly, achingly slowly, it crawls down the end of his metal arm. He pushes it into the candle, feels it crack. The afternoon light leaks in through the seams of his eyelids.

“Done,” he says, soft, and then clears his throat. Repeats himself. Forces his eyes open to find Steve’s glowing white and trained on him. “Uh. It should- it should be fine.”

Steve blinks and his eyes are back to their normal blue. “Thanks, Buck.” And they’re warm, those eyes, and so are the creases at their corners, and so is the crook at the corner of his mouth. So is his palm, tucked under Bucky’s thumb. 

Bucky takes his hand away, lets his arms drop onto his lap. He feels awkward, suddenly. Too big for his skin. He looks down at the candle just so he doesn’t have to look at Steve head-on, half-expecting it to be cracked clean in half. There’s only a tiny fissure, though, that starts at the wick and trails off a little less than an eighth of the way down. “No problem.”

+

Steve devours _The Happy Prince_ on Bucky’s couch. Bucky tries to get some studying done: SHIELD might be giving him a partial scholarship, but that doesn’t mean he’s got the smarts for it. He flips through textbooks as the sun falls alarmingly fast outside the window and the birds rise off their perches, the six o’clock rush to make it out of the tangle of buildings, windowsills, ledges, poles, into the open sky where they remain for one frozen moment before flitting off to wherever they sleep.

Dinner is a late affair. There’s a fucking awesome shawarma place a couple blocks down from his apartment building; he takes Steve there, bundled in a too-big jacket that has a thermal charm woven into the seams, hands shoved in his pockets. Steve’s smiling, despite the cold. Bucky wants to kiss him, a little, but pushes it aside. They get pita wraps and too-large Cokes and traipse back over the cracked sidewalks to Bucky’s- they both like the indoors, and Steve’s yawning already. The Coke sloshes over the side into the bag, and the wraps promptly fall apart as soon as they try to eat them. But what they lack in structural integrity, they more than make up for in pretty much everything else, and the hummus and pita makes Bucky want to cry. They’re gonna watch Sharknado after dinner. Steve is going to sleep on a proper bed (fine, mattress); Bucky will take the couch. It’s all good.

“I might be leaving in the morning,” says Steve.

“You- oh,” says Bucky. “Uh, where?”

Steve glances up at him from across the kitchen table, then looks down again. There’s a bit of tahini at the corner of his mouth. “I don’t know yet.”

Something tightens in Bucky’s chest. “Like around the city?”

“Yeah,” says Steve. “Exploring, I guess.”

“Sure,” nods Bucky. It’s- not the best, but still okay. “Cool. You sure you don’t want me to come with?”

The tap drips. Bucky’s never really figured out how to light his kitchen properly- he’s tried a bunch of different bulbs, different brightnesses, and now he’s stuck with a murky, orange sort of light that softens everything, throws it more into shadow than anything else. Steve’s eyes are on a spot just above Bucky’s right shoulder. “I need to be alone,” Steve says at last.

“Okay then,” says Bucky, because what the fuck else can he say?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> huge, huge thank you to Jemmalaine for betaing!!!
> 
> and now the usual stuff: kudos and comments make me v v happy, concrit makes me happier, have a good day love you bye <3

**Author's Note:**

> few things.  
> -this is a wip,  
> -kudos and comments are my lifeblood,  
> -this was unbeta'd (is that how you verb) so if you catch any mistakes, feel free to let me know,  
> -if you're interested in betaing, hit me up in the comments,  
> -yell at me cry at me it's all good and i will respond,  
> -i am open to concrit. (more than open. i am inviting it. this is an invitation to say things at me),  
> -love you have a good day <3


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